


Carry your world, and all your hurt

by voices_in_my_head



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Tattooed!Peeta, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 09:59:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10534149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voices_in_my_head/pseuds/voices_in_my_head
Summary: "He comes back just as he promised, except this time the inner part of his left arm from elbow to shoulder is covered in primrose flowers."





	

Peeta draws. He draws people, from his past and present, he draws things, he draws landscapes and when he finally draws the Mockingjay with trembling fingers he thinks back to the people in the Capitol who tattooed themselves with things that could never be washed away and he decides he’s going to do that too.

Part of him is afraid of waking up one day and wanting to rip his own skin off because Peeta can’t remember the meaning of the drawing but hey, right now his skin is pristine and he still wants to rip it off sometimes so why not.

But he doesn’t start with the Mockingjay. It’ll never be in his body, Peeta knows. He wants simple things in his body, or at least simple at a first look and the Mockingjay still means so much more than he understands that he doesn’t want to deal with it every day.

So he draws a small primrose flower in blue and then in purple and pink and yellow and suddenly he has a whole page of them and finally goes to find out how he can get a tattoo. In Twelve there’s no one that has ever done it so he takes the train to Four, where it isn’t unusual for people to get tattoos.

He tells Katniss and Haymitch he’ll be gone a couple days but doesn’t explain himself and they don’t ask. Peeta doesn’t think too long on why.

He comes back just as he promised, except this time the inner part of his left arm from elbow to shoulder is covered in primrose flowers.

Katniss’ eyes linger on them but her face doesn’t change and he doesn’t ask what she thinks. Peeta’s fingers are begging to draw and so he sits on the floor with the notebook on his lap while Katniss reads.

The tattoo artist, Meika, told him that tattoos could become an addiction and before she’d started he hadn’t believed her, but halfway through he started to understand because part of him wanted her to just keep going and never stop. He hadn’t really considered the pain aspect until he’d been sitting and then he’d almost asked her to strap him because what if the needle brought up memories? But the moment the needle touched his skin and he could see colour being left behind all of his fear left him and he was mesmerized and when she told him hours had gone by he’d blinked and hadn’t believed her.

Of course, Peeta’s body isn’t endless. He isn’t even sure that he wants tattoos covering the whole of it but he still decides to keep on working on the next ones. He has one for Prim, now he needs one for his brothers: Joshua and Matyas.

Joshua was older than him by two years and he’d left home the day he’d turned eighteen to build his life with his new wife, Katlyn, who’d been living next to their house all their life. He still came to work every day and he’d always been kind but Peeta had seen him try to make his own life away from them and that had hurt some but he had never faulted him for it.

Peeta sometimes wonders if Joshua had been working when the bombs hit. He imagines that if someone had gone to his house to warn him and Katlyn they would have left, while in the bakery he imagines their mother would never have left anyone leave, would never have let herself believe that something that terrible really was coming.

Matyas was five years younger and they’d never had much in common. Matyas was close to their mother in a way that his older siblings never had been and so he was always treated kindly and Peeta had never hated him for it, but he’d been slightly jealous and more important, he’d never understood what made him so special, but he still hadn’t hated him. Matyas had been the only one to visit him at least once a week in the Victor’s house he’d received and that his mother had forbidden his family to move into because they were bakers, not Victors. Peeta had never understood why Matyas had visited so often when they usually spent the time in silence. Sometimes Peeta had baked and Matyas had mocked him for it, told him how he was losing his touch, being rich and not needing to work anymore, and Peeta had looked at him the first time expecting him to be mocking him, but he was just smiling and Peeta wondered if he knew that this, being treated like he was still the same Peeta Mellark whose name had been chosen for the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games, was something that he desperately craved.

He wishes he’d asked. He wishes they were alive in a way he hadn’t really though he cared enough. Maybe it was more the idea of them. Some days Peeta missed them so much he could barely walk while others he never thought of them but slowly he got used to the missing part of him.

So he draws a simple Joshua tree in black and different tones of grey and a butterfly for Matyas because he remembers when he was five he liked to follow them around and laugh whenever they landed on him and there’s no one around to ask if that’s real or not so Peeta decides he’s going to make it real even if it wasn’t because they deserved better and he won’t let them be forgotten.

Peeta goes to Four again and comes back with a tree that goes from the ankle to just below his left knee and a mariposa butterfly on the inside of his right arm, below the elbow and Katniss’ eyes linger a bit more and this time there’s something in her eyes but Peeta can’t figure out what.

Haymitch just snorts and tells him, “nice ink” and Peeta isn’t sure if there wasn’t something derogatory there, something about him still having some Capitol on him (was it always there? Did they put it in alongside the venom?) but he smiles after and Peeta smiles back and that’s it.

For a while after, the drawings stay just in the paper. He still has more than enough money to pay for more tattoos but he isn’t sure where to go to next.

His mother hurt him too much for him to want her to be a part of him physically forever when she’s already in the inside and it hurts to think of his father for many other reasons. He keeps wondering of how much he never really knew the man and he can draw his face as best as any but there’s something missing in his eyes and Peeta thinks it’s going to take a while to get the right drawing for him. So he keeps drawing on notebooks and Katniss goes to his bed at night to make the nightmares disappear and Haymitch eats with them more often than not and life goes on.

Annie sends a picture of her son and Peeta draws a trident and he almost thinks of getting that tattooed but then destroys it because Finnick had been kind to him when not many had been willing to. Finnick had never looked at him with pity in his eyes and he deserves to be remembered as more than a trident.

So he makes a circle and inside it he draws the ocean on the bottom and the stars on top and he leaves the next day.

Peeta debates on whether to visit Annie before or after the tattoo and decides to go after because there’s no Finnick without her.

Annie cries and he tells them that Finnick is the sea and she’s the stars and she hugs him and lets him hold her baby, Luke, and he leaves lighter than he came, with a circle of different blues on the inside part of his right arm above his elbow.

He draws the Mockingjay again but still doesn’t consider it. Katniss still doesn’t ask about the tattoos and Haymitch eyes are soft and life keeps going on.

The next drawing comes to him in the middle of the night. He wakes up with a gasp and leaves the room quickly and the drawing is made in rushes and it’s frantic and Peeta is crying and one tear falls on the drawing and that’s when he stops, with his name still running through his mind.

_Bryan Mitchell. Bryan Mitchell. Bryan Mitchell._

Peeta knows that he was raised by his grandmother because his mother died when he was still a child and no one ever knew who his father was and he became a soldier at age sixteen and he could shoot at long distance even better than Katniss and he had a witty type of humour and liked to sprout wisdom at the weirdest times.

He knows because he asked many soldiers in 13 about him. Peeta knows because he visited his grandmother and apologized profusely and she’d touched his cheek and told him to get better, to not let her grandson’s death be in vain and Peeta promised and everyday he tries to keep his promise because Bryan Mitchell did nothing wrong and he killed him.

Peeta drew a body being covered in black goo but he’d never insult him like that so more calmly he draws lighting. His face is concentrated but his touch is light. They almost look like veins and it feels right for reasons that Peeta doesn’t quite understand but doesn’t question.

This time he tells Katniss where he’s going but doesn’t ask her to come with him. He’s not sure he’d accept if she asked to join either because getting a tattoo is personal, this one more than any.

Bryan Mitchell would still have been alive if Peeta had never met Katniss and hadn’t fallen in love and hadn’t been such a good piece in the game to torture over. Or maybe he would have died in combat. Maybe he would have died from the same disease that took his mother.

And maybe he would have gotten married and had babies. Peeta doesn’t like to think of the maybes because they hurt too much and they make his breathing catch and he feels like he’s going to pass out from lack of air so he forces himself to think of other things.

He looks through the train window the whole way to Four and in a few months, it’ll have officially changed its name just like One, Three and Six already have. People have brought the subject up in Twelve but no one has any idea what to call it. Someone asked him and Peeta had for one moment thought of telling them “Hope” but that isn’t a good city name, he doesn’t think. So he’d shrugged and no one had asked again.

The tattoo goes on the inside of his right leg from ankle to knee and Peeta thinks of visiting Thirteen and seeing Bryan Mitchell’s grandmother again but he knows it would be selfish, more for his benefit than hers. What does it matter that he has a tattoo in memory of her grandson? It certainly won’t bring him back.

Next come two small doves below the neck, on his back. They’re turned to each other, almost creating a circle, but not actually touching. The one in the light blue ink is for Mags and the one in light purple is for Rue. It’s a shame they never met, he thinks. They would have gotten along well, he’s sure.

Peeta debates what to make for Johanna and then realizes that all his tattoos are for the dead and puts the pencil down and goes to call her instead and finally force her to visit like she’d promised because his body is becoming a memorial and he doesn’t regret any of the tattoos but there are people alive around him and he refuses to immortalize them when they’re still changing and growing and he’d rather witness that than draw something that’s stopped in time, because they are not. He is not.

So Peeta calls her and she refuses to visit and insults him and the awful weather they have because Seven might be cold, but Twelve is like a different world and then they laugh and he thinks it should feel weirder because their connection was born out of desperation. Katniss was the only one that truly understood him after their first Games and likewise Johanna is the only one that truly understand his fear of darkness and small spaces just like he understands her fear of water. Sometimes it hurts to look at her and Peeta knows it hurts for her to look at him but she always picks up the phone when he calls and when he goes quiet because he can’t force himself to ask “real or not real?” she just keeps breathing on the line.

So some drawings stay just on paper and life keeps going on and Peeta still has money and space for more tattoos but right now they’re enough. He’s okay.

 


End file.
